Blowhard Bill O’Reilly would argue that I’m a liberal just because I’m a “member of the media.” The truth is that I’m pretty moderate, and this week’s DTV delay has left me a bit conflicted, politically speaking.
On the one hand, the liberal in me sees good sense in giving struggling consumers more time to get their ducks in a row before dropping one more expense in their laps. I also realize that the government’s analog-to-digital coupon program ran out of funds before everyone who needed one could buy one.
The “conservative” in me, however, sees it another way. I think that consumers had plenty of time to get their act together, if they really even needed a converter box in the first place. I’m convinced that a lot of people who picked up coupons didn’t actually require them to watch TV after the transition. I don’t know a single person who depends on rabbit ears to receive TV programming. Maybe that makes me a snob, but I’d always heard that most folks even in the lower income brackets tend to be cable or satellite subscribers. Those folks get digital service whether they like or not, so wouldn’t need a converter box.
I’m also a big-time deadline guy. I like a hard deadline and usually get annoyed when a deadline is missed (wonder why??). We’ve been building toward this February 17 cutoff for so long, that now it feels like it was all a big tease. Maybe this is what the government had planned all along. It’s kind of like when I give my writers a due date for their articles that’s actually two weeks before I need them. In government time, two weeks must translate to four months.
Plus, this is just TV we’re talking about. My “Great Depression Era sensibility” still gnaws at the back of my mind, making me see TV as a gluttonous waste of brain cells. So what if your service is shut off. Read a book and the newspaper instead.
Oh well. As they say, it is what it is. Enjoy the extension, but take this time to get your clients up to speed.
